A break-down of the code

I've been thinking about baudrillard's Requiem in relation to 9/11. His latter work on 9/11 indicates the possibility of a horrific transcendence of the code in an act of terrorism that epitomizes a new kind of symbolic exchange beyond the normalcy of the code of the reified exchange system. Here is a model of the code of exchange before I move onto how 9/11 complicates this entire structure

Capital (value exchange) Media (image/info exchange)

Products	Events (including speech or communication events)
Labor value, fetishization, reification, etc…	Prestructured models of interaction (fait divers all becomes organized into political categories)
Control of Surplus Value, immateriality of labor, social factory, etc	Mass Mediatization and the logic of reproducibility
Too numerous to mention	Singularity of revolutionary act, immediacy of communication, Symbolic exchange beyond or against the code, democracy beyond decentralized authoritarianism
Resistant Poaching or Interactivity or Exit or “new Communism” of the multitude, etc….	The mortality of speech over the prescripted/preordained referendum style of writing, politics of surface immediacy without truth referent

“Stuff”

“Filtered”

through

“Effects”

(or causes)

Political Loss

(requiem)





Solutions

Privacy & Publicity

I think what Bogard wants to say by stating that “in the telematic imaginary, total privacy is fully consistent with total publicity” is that actually there is nothing we can hide because everything of individuals has already been open to control. What we experience everyday on the web is an imaginary, which conceals that “reality no more exists outside than inside the bound of the artificial perimeter” (Baudrillard). The privacy performed on the web and based on this imaginary is a simulacra. And this imaginary world requires you to submit information. According to Baudrillard, a simulacra does not have origin. However this imaginary without origin is more real than real reality. Therefore, it is hypereality.
Discussing new biosurveillance technologies (p. 129), Bogard borrows Baudrillard’s theory again: “in fact, by this time real privacy, the master signifier, like the real body, is already lost, and the apparent mechanisms to which it has been lost (surveillance apparatuses) are the very mechanism that now generate it as a hyperreality, launch it into orbit.”

Simulation. Surveillance, and Risk Society?

Bogard said that surveillance is not just about maintaining and reproducing social order but it is also "a fantasy of power" driven by simulation, which Baudrillard defines as "feining what one doesn't have." I kept on thinking about risk society and how Bogard's concept of surveillance as not just controlling things that are happening but controlling what can happen (imaginary happenings) in the real world can apply to risk society. America has become a greater risk society post 9-11 (fear, anxiety, panic have driven Americans to prepare for diasters that have not happened but COULD happen by stocking up duct tapes, altering schedules according to the color coded security system, and most of all, preemptive strike). It was the imagination/simulation of what could have happend with the WMDs that triggered the Bush Administration to invade Iraq. I think this is where Baudrillard's use of the word, "deterrence," comes in handy as it is a strategy of preempting reality.

MSNBC's reality show, To Catch a Predator, seems to best capture the trinity of simulation, surveillance, and risk society. The show uses hidden cameras to monitor and capture the POTENTIAL child sex abusers who have made contacts with children (who are posed by volunteers from Perverted Justice, an online watchdog group for child sex offenders). The problem with this show is that it is not about punishing people who have committed the crime but who MIGHT violate the law (a very Minority Report like situation). The show is not about correcting the broken system that enables children sex labor, sexual abuse, and kidnapping to continue but rather covering up that the system is broken by highlighting one or two individuals that might violate the law. In this sense, To Catch a Predator is like the Watergate Scandal, which Baudrillard argued was a scapegoat incident to cover the pervasive corruption in the political field. By preempting strike on the potential lawbreakers through a simulated surveillance, the show provides a false sense of security in the risk society that crimes will be prevented when in reality (if there is such thing), the system remains broken.

I Hyperrealize?

(1) Cyborgs have no privacy (unless it’s simulated). After Tuesday’s class, I started thinking about how he posits a telematic society where publicity and privacy coincide. I have to admit, one of the things that really resonated, especially after class, was this idea of the Korean RRN. In Venezuela, we have a similar national ID number. We use it for any form, any public comment (e.g., letters to the editor are signed with this ID number). I kept on wondering why it is that these countries use this ID number so liberally whereas the confidentiality of the SSN in the USA is sacrosanct. It’s almost like in the USA we preserve this secret which means that we are entitled to privacy. If you take away secrets (total publicity) we have no ‘real’ privacy to preserve.

Bogard seems to posit a similar scenario, a cyborg or clone with an overcoded and precoded body (not private, already exposed because the code is known) that is perfectly known, is totally exposed, with no secret to keep and nothing to keep private, is perfectly anonymous and undistinguishable – total publicity = total privacy. This idea of the undistinguishable yet unique was tricky, but I was able to wrap my head around it a bit, when Bogard says, “As that path opens to all, fame itself definitively vanishes as a mark of distinction...everyone is instantly famous, instantly forgotten” (Bogard 141). “The orbitalization of privacy through the erasure of machinic-organic boundaries, and the forging of an indissoluble connection between simulation and surveillance technologies. The cyborg and the clone as the paradoxical figures of the hyperization of privacy and its fantastic, absurd crash into nothing. The clone and the cyborg are the ultimate Others, inscrutable because they are perfectly known” (Bogard 145).

Privacy is restored through simulation (the privacy/truth paradox Bogard goes into): either through simulated private space and intimacy or through information saturation (using language similar to Dean’s always frustrated conspiring subject): “Information saturation always leaves one with the suspicion that nothing has been understood, that in fact the crucial information has been left out or excluded...The very information that encloses and saturates them gurantees that they won’t be known, that they will always remain obscure and mysterious” (Bogard 151).

(2) The Soft Control of Simulated Surveillance. We (and Bogard himself) may dismiss Bogard’s telematic society as fiction, but his discussion about the control effected by this simulated surveillance was also really reminiscent of Terranova’s soft control. Simulated surveillance seems mighty similar to the forms of soft control we discussed in class weeks ago. Bogard explains, “The biomachinic assemblage works to erase permanently the already tenuous distinction between the individual and the totality, and substitute instead a kind of pure, cybernetic operationality or connectivity...This assemblage masks a rather simple aim to develop a closed system where all process can be translated and managed as flows from and back into information – no longer conformity to a historically variable and continuously contested system of norms, but rather, if you will, production, from and return to a singular, universal norm of norms” (Bogard 30). He continues, “[Simulated surveillance’s] strategy is always control in advance, hyperized, front-end, programmed control – regulation as a matter of feedback, models, circuitry design, interface, and integration” (Bogard 32).

Terranova discussed soft control in a similar way when discussing control mechanisms for acentred multitudes involving different levels: “the production of rule tables determining the local relations between neighboring nodes; the selection of appropriate initial conditions’ and the construction of aims and fitness functions that act like sieves within a liquid space, literally searching for the new and the useful” (Terranova 115). Terranova continues (and tell me this doesn’t sound like something straight out of Bogard), “The new place of the individual in the mode of immanent control is not as a model for the organization of a multitude, but as a tool that allows the overcoding and the ultimate containment of the productive power of flow...to the dissolution of the individual into the productive powers of the multitude, corresponds an over-coding of the multitude onto the individual element understood as a unit of code” (Terranova 123).

(3) Cyborg Work. Bogard’s description of cyborg work were also uncannily similar to a lot of the readings on immaterial labor, with a few additions that seemed answer some of the outstanding questions about and implications of this immaterial labor. For Bogard, in telematic societies, the project to extract surplus value (and exploit labor) entails exchanging “living labor for simulated labor, or what I call ‘cyber work,’ which doesn’t mean just work using computers, but the informatization and virtualization of the entire work environment (Bogard 98). Bowring described a similar trend when discussing Hardt and Negri’s Empire, “The increase in non-working time brought about by the expansion of large-scale industry outstrips the power of fixed capital, so that ‘the surplus labor of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth.’ Instead we have the development of the collective powers of labor as an autonomous productive force (Bowring 115).

“In telematic societies, cyborg work is not simply unproductive, or even not-productive; it is in fact, ultraproductive, production as information and information as production...Information is what cyborgs ‘produce’” (Bogard 109). Similarly, Hardt uses the idea of a prosthesis and Haraway’s cyborg when discussing affective labor, “Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves...This type of immaterial labor is called ‘symbolic-analyitic’” (Hardt 95).

There are two concepts pertaining to our discussion of immaterial labor that Bogard problematizes (a) the collapse of valorization and the apparent end of Capitalism, and (b) the unalienated immaterial laborer. With regards to the former, “As soon as labor in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labor time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value must cease to be the measure of use value. The surplus labor of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth” (Marx, Grundisse). Bogard seems to allude to this same shift, “It is in the effort to transgress this limit, to consume the totality of living labor, that capital simulates labor, and in so doing begins the transition from a material productive order to a rematerialized, informated order of simulation, a cyborg order” (Bogard 103). But he uses Baudrillard to discuss the decline of the commercial law of value and instead describes, “The evolution of third-order simulacra constitutes the regime of simulation proper, governed by the structural law of value and the emergence of a hyperreal economy”(Bogard 109). I am having trouble understanding what this structural law of value is and whether it responds to this contradiction that Marx brings up in the Grundisse.

With regards to the latter, Bogard mentions this idea that labor owns the means of production [i.e., their brains] in the realm of immaterial labor, “The movement to close the gap between production and control also explodes the very principle on which Capital was founded, the alienation or externality of the product and the producer. Cyborg labor, in a paradoxical movement, supports capitalist production only to subvert historically sedimented relations of power in the workforce...when virtual production substitutes for production, control slips from the grasp of Capital” (Bogard 110). Bogard uses Baudrillard to kind of say, “So what if you own your brain?” “Cyborg work represents nothing more than a radical intensification of these processes: surveillance now saturates work to the point of defining it. Instead of ‘informing’ on work as it occurs, it informates work in advance, closing the gap between activity and its sign...the product of labor is simultaneously its record” (Bogard 115). Your options, your choices, your labor are already afforded by the program, the code.

(4) Beniger 2.0. This entire narrative could be the epilogue to Beniger’s The Control Revolution. Beniger’s narrative of continuity – discussing the need for speed and the rise of technologies in response to a crisis in control – seems to coincide with the historical growth of the technologies of surveillance in the 18^th and 19^th centuries that Bogard mentions: “The coevolution of energy utilization, processing speed, and control, the gains from control technologies that accrue through increasing reliability and predictability, and the increasing control required of control technologies themselves – account for the Control Revolution that has continued unabated from the 1880s to the present” (Beniger 293). Bogard also claims a narrative of continuity, “As a strategy of control [the simulation of surveillance] is a simple and ancient idea...the observation machine of postindustrial societies – is dromological; it operates on speed, on the time of movement...In the abstract, power is the policing of speed, of material flows, by the machinery of observation” (Bogard 26).

(5) Telematic Perversions. The paradoxes of the simulation of surveillance were very reminiscent of the perversions mentioned by Zizek in “The Matrix, or, the Two Sides of Perversions.” Zizek posits the juxtaposition of the two aspect of perversion, “on the one hand, reduction of reality to a virtual domain regulated by arbitray rules that can be suspended” (omnipotent subject); “on the other hand, the concealed truth of this freedom, the reduction of the subject to an utter instrumentalized passivity” (mediatized subject). Bogard echoes this almost verbatim, “Simulated surveillance refers to a paradox of control. It is a fantasy of absolute control and the absence of control at the same time, total control and the end (perfection, cancellation) of control” (Bogard 22).

Perfect Deterrence?

One of the initial problems I had with Bogard (and I am now realizing it might be with Foucault, whose discussion of panopticism he relies upon) was how the logic of panopticism “induces offenders to police their own behavior, transforming them into ‘subjects…’” And it is this turn on “subject” that Foucault, and arguably Bogard too, is making. It seems that panoptical surveillance creates at once a subject and object of the surveilled – object in so far as it is the “prisoner” on whom the disciplinary gaze falls, and subject in so far as that same prisoner ends up playing a proactive role in his/her own discipline, ensuring “docility.”
I’m not sure if I can wholly digest Bogard’s claim that in perfect form, simulation leads to perfect deterrence, which is “a state where deterrence is no longer necessary” (32). On the one hand, this might coincide nicely with the above, with the seeming hybridity that exists in the object/subject. If I am the object of my own gaze, my own disciplinary subjectivity, have I surpassed the point Bogard is referring to, where deterrence is no longer necessary? But isn’t that a type of deterrence in itself. Having an individual or a population self-monitor, I think, is not some form of perfect deterrence. It might be a sophisticated one, and it might reduce the amount of information processing or even pre-processing that authorities have to do, but it is still deterrence, more hidden but not, I would say, perfect.

More non-digital free labor

Just in case you did not catch it, this is a story from the NYTimes about a stylish entrepreneur who moved his free labor digital writers into the print media world. I like the part where he explains that not having to pay writers means that he can use higher quality paper in the magazine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/business/media/24mag.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Virtual Sex, Actual Adultery?

A concern running through Bogard's work revolves around the concept of intimacy in relation to simulation and surveillance. As we get a hint of the first page of the next chapter dealing with "Sex in telematic societies" I do not feel as if I am off base with this assertion.

I would like to primarily focus on the "privacy/trust simulacrum" and try to link this with developing concerns of online spousal or romantic partner infidelity.

In the privacy/trust simulacrum section, Bogard notes on p. 149, "Likewise, intimacy is not lost, but purified and hyperized (in virtual space it is possible to be 'closer than close,' more than intimate, but still keep a safe 'distance,' just as it is to be 'farther than far,' but still retain an operational closeness. In our societies the screen is what is close and far, intimate and distant, private and public."

Even the Wall Street Journal seems to pick up on "hyperized" intimacy - see this article "Is This Man Cheating On His Wife?" This is an article concerning a man who has a real life wife and a wife on Second Life.

Some highlights from this article that are relevant to the conversation include the husband's assertion that, "it's only a game." A second highlight is the commentary of the real life (RL) wife "You try to talk to someone or bring them a drink, and they'll be having sex with a cartoon."

The couple is "closer than close" but still at "a safe distance." He is married, is intimate with someone online, but it is "only a game."

On p. 150 Bogard offers further useful commentary to understand a situation such as this, "You don't escape, you sacrifice yourself."

I figure this online infidelity concept is a useful way to mobilize the work Bogard does in this piece. Other concerns such as the one Mark raised in his post about class issues, I will just have to leave for class-time exploration.

Just for clarification - it does not seem that the couple highlighted in the WSJ article agreed to a polyamorous relationship.

Superhyperultrablogamatics

Although it sometimes reads like it was written by a heavily caffeinated ferret, I like Bogard’s book. As a sci-fi fan, I am forced to assent to the argument that the technological imaginary is a powerful force in shaping the specific character of social fantasies. I’ll just offer a short note on the relation of his idea of the simulation of surveillance to Lacan’s insistence on the future anterior as the “matrix for the historicity of the subject” (Weber, Return to Freud, 7).

Bogard writes that “Simulation technology, for all we hear about the exciting possibilities of its future development, is in fact more about a nostalgia or melancholy for the future; it produces a sense that the future is not ahead, but in some fundamental way already over, in the same way the life of a clone is predetermined, already over from the start, or the way a video game or artificial intelligence machine contains all its possibilities in its program” (23). Incidentally, I think this melancholy can be felt in the examples he uses to illustrate his points throughout the book—isn’t there something extremely anticlimactic in the writing when he pins a theory to an actual (virtual) phenomenon? At other places in the book, Bogard does not refer to simulation technologies as producing nostalgia or melancholy, but rather a kind of satisfaction that all eventualities have been accounted for, and humans possess the means to control, order, and administrate the social world: “some form of coded information (sign-image) anticipates an actual event in order to control its outcome (20). The reason for this ambivalence, or better, the reason that all of these effects are produced simultaneously, is related to the fundamentally uncertain status of the future anterior (future perfect in English), an issue to which I will have returned momentarily. Bogard is arguing that simulation determines the field of possibilities for the emergence of the actual, and thus the actual is always-already fully “virtualized.” What makes the video game in the quotation above different from a novel is that the video game presents us with a scenario in which choice is possible within a limited range of control mechanisms that determine what choices are possible (action must remain goal-directed for instance). In the novel, we just follow a script, and choice is irrelevant. This idea is reminiscent of Zizek’s “mediatization,” which in which control masquerades as choice.

For Bogard, the issue of simulation seems more complex than just outlining the dominant form of control in information societies. Aside from control we have these strange surplus productions: nostalgia and melancholy. At the same time that simulation saps affect from daily life by removing unpredictability and reducing all events to the status of simulacra (Jameson’s “waning of affect”), it creates affect in the form of melancholy (as well as, I’d argue, ecstatic mania). How does this happen? I believe that it is in simulation’s inability to completely circumscribe the real that these remainders are produced. The future anterior (the register of simulation), according to Samuel Weber, “designates a surmise, a conditional prediction, and hence, a proposition bearing on an uncertain state of affairs.” The status of the future as uncertain, as always yet-to-be, haunts the simulation. As Lacan writes, “The subject…always has an anticipatory relationship to his own realization which in turn throws him back onto the level of a profound insufficiency and betokens a rift in him, a primal sundering, a thrownness.” Similarly, it is the “profound insufficiency” of the (actual) simulation that produces a “primal sundering” between it and the (virtual) future. For Lacan, this split is the precondition of becoming a subject in the world: in recognizing a distinction between self and other, to become a subject means to be alienated from a fantasmatic image of pre-subjective wholeness. The subject is forever alienated, in other words, from the object of desire. Temporally, this object maintains an uncertain status: it never really exists except as a fantasmatic construction postulated to have been at some point prior to the subject. Weber explains: “In invoking the future anterior tense, Lacan troubles the perfected closure of the always-already-having-been by inscribing it in the inconclusive futurity of what will-always-already-have-been, a “time” which can never be entirely remembered, since it will never have fully taken place. It is an irreducible remainder or remnant that will continually prevent the subject from ever becoming fully self-identical”

Weber is explaining the status of originary trauma in psychoanalytic discourse. Without going into it too much, we can say that part of the work of therapy includes constructing this trauma (not remembering it) as the origin point of the subject; “memory” in psychoanalytic discourse has the status of a construction—a simulation of the supposed past that helps construct a history of the subject which in turn helps to determine what the subject is in the process of becoming. This is a confusing concept—Lacan explains it more clearly: “What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.” What is realized in constructing a history is a “simulation” of what one was for who one will be. This construction always entails a narrative of loss, of the institution of a primal rift. It is not surprising then that simulation produces melancholy (although mourning would be more precise since there is a specific object: the future), since each simulation forecloses a future from actually happening. We might say that the simulation continually prevents reality from ever becoming fully self-identical, to paraphrase Weber, calling our attention to the rift in the social.

Rain, snow or apocalypse; the US Mail Delivers

There is a secondary aesthetic issue that precedes this writing, the dialectical reversal of the promise of technological utopia. Writing the distopia is presented as a particular strategy designed to counter the pernicious effects of a simulacrum. My argument is not that the two are not opposed, but that they truly are two sides of the same coin. Both modes of writing are predicated on the Sublime. Niko might speak more to the background here, but briefly the sublime for Kant a like a force of nature that is beyond the limit of comprehension as a thing in itself. My argument here will roll this way: the Sublime character of the fictions keeps the narrative away from the body and the lived experience there to.

The easy answer to this characterization is to handle the articulation of the utopian vision of the status quo as sublime. There is no fundamental difference here except the willingness of individuals in media studies to be earlier adopters of technology. This is an even easier answer. Hard answer follows: The power of terrible nanobots, surveillance technology run amok or the matrix are just as much fiction as the story of the end of privilege. At the end of the technological utopia story a great force somehow erases the history of the characters in that very story. Similarities between the stories outweigh the differences; particularly the crux of both stories is the flattening of identity. Interesting that the end of the excerpted work seems to find escape in an attempt to flood the channel with data, a highly personal liberation, a parallel to the highly personal practice of the self that Foucault described?

The rapid movement from Foucault to Baudrillard covers some of the detail we could get from the former. Although the Foucault cited in the opening paragraph uses writing as a technique of self-discovery if not creation. Baudrillard and Virillo come in to answer the simple question, to what end? The skepticism of the death built into the accelerating structure of modernity is clearly a core focus for Virillo at least. The task for the writer of a social science fiction then is to present a particular fictional text for oppositional deployment. Balance would be achieved in a juxtaposition of the utopia of the status quo with the distopian fictions crafted by the authors. Truth as such is not the goal here, but the creation of a polemic. I will/am brining Virillio’s Unknown Quantity for a more graphic display of the argument. The real robust part of this reading is the defense of writing polemic fictions, as a technology of the self these would create the contrast that would distinguish dangerous forms of social control from those that are fundamentally less important. In regular space/time there isn’t a good way to make arguments predicated on the slippery slope fallacy fly. All too often, the banality of reality intervenes as the reality as such has far fewer interesting characters.

Since I am obligated to answer all rhetorical questions and explain my jokes, the title of the post was a tip off to the multiplicity of things that could be characterized as sublime, mainly natural disasters, then I thought, even in the result of nanobot attack, the mail will still come. That will be totally boss.

--dan

The Simulation of Surveillance

He's a little bit repetitive, but I thought Bogard's argument(s) about the relationship of surveillance and simulation are interesting ones that advance the discussion. Open ended response: how useful are these formulations? How far are we willing to follow him into "social class differences don't matter in the least" land? Or into the realm of the cyber-perruque?

Asterisk to the previous post

Turns out crucifixes are also being made by sweatshop labor. This sounds like an Onion story -- I'm not sure if I trust it. Anyone care to verify it? The truth is out there.

Excerpt: In the Junxingye factory in China, the mostly young women—including several 15- and 16-year-olds—making crucifixes are forced to work 14 hours to 15½ hours a day, from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. or 11:30 p.m., seven days a week. They also work frequent 18-hour and 19-hour shifts ending at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. Before shipments of crucifixes must leave for the United States, there are even mandatory, all-night 22½-hour to 25-hour shifts, from 8 a.m. straight through to 6:30 a.m. or 9 a.m. the following morning. Workers are routinely at the factory more than 100 hours a week, including being forced to work 51 hours of overtime, which exceeds China’s legal limit by 514 percent. Young women go for months on end without a day off.

Reality Check: It's not all cybernetic

This NYTimes story about the outsourcing of manhole cover manufacturing drives the point home:

"The scene was as spectacular as it was anachronistic: flames, sweat and liquid iron mixing in the smoke like something from the Middle Ages."

It does seem to shed some light on globalization and, in particular, transportation costs versus labor costs.

Free Labor: The Policing Version

The feds are tapping into the surveillance capacities of cell phones -- one of the key moves in the emerging information economy is the individuation of interactive devices, unlike terrestrial lines, cell phones are typically associated with a specific individual (and her/his movements through space and time).

Free Labor Kool-Aid

For those of you who have drunk the Kool-Aid of the commercial power of digital free labor, I have this mildly behind-the-scenes link to a company whose primary purpose is to organize and encourage this. I am working (for another class) on the ideology of baby monitors as presented in consumer reviews on commercial websites. This is a company that helps other companies incorporate consumer reviews onto their own websites as a way to boost sales.

The link is: http://www.powerreviews.com/social-shopping/solutions/

Nitpicking Jenkins?

Let me be clear. I thought Jenkins was fun to read. It was the easiest to read among all the readings we had to do this semester so far (well, Rheingold too). But I see so many gaps in his arguments that it's hard not to talk about them.
So my first discontent would be...his refusal of seeing digital divide or "access to technology" as an economic gap between cultures and countries. He seems to think that participation gap would be overcome once the "cultural factors" that prohibit different groups from paticipating would be confronted. However, these cultural factors that Jenkins talks about is deeply rooted in the economic gap between different groups of people and culture as well and I find it problematic that Jenkins argues that the "cultural factors that diminish the likelihood that different groups will participate" can be overcome merely through public education. This seems to be the kind of argument that privileged people with "cultural capital" (scholars such as Jenkins) would be saying.

My second problem with Jenkins' arguments may be an extension of my first problem. He seems to argue that participatory culture is democratic because people get to be involved in the process of production and distribution of cultural products, which is a very populist message. However, for one to participate, a certain amount of knowledge and access to technology are prerequisite. Even Jenkins admits that people of participatory culture (for now) are mostly white, middle-upper class, men. Then, how can this be a democratic process if certain people becomes excluded (for economic, cultural, and social factors) in the participatory culture? Would it be a far stretch if I say that Jenkins seems to believe that those who engage in participatory culture are better citizens (ahem...I mean, consumers) than those who don't?

Another paradox in his argument about the democratic characteristic of particpatory culture and knowledge community. Jenkins does acknowledge that some people have more access to information and knowledge ("brain trust") which makes them experts in certain fields. However, he seems to see these experts functioning outside of the knowledge community. I think he tends to dismiss the idea that hierarchy (in terms of possession of knowledge, access to technology, etc.) exists even within the knowledge community (okay, he does acknowledge that some people are more "experts" than others and when people like ChillOne and others participate as "experts" it threatens the "more open-ended and democratic principles upon which a collective intelligence operates" (p. 54) but he still argues these experts are needed for the fun of "spoiling" to continue in the community) when it is clear that experts emerge within this community. When experts emerge in the community, the non-expert participants begin to rely on these experts for their knowledge and pleasure (of course, non-experts' trust that experts will deliver their needs has to established first). Doesn't reliance on experts contradict to the "equal participation, equal responsibility, etc." principle of democracy? Or am I reading too much out of nothing?

Another thing that Jenkins makes his argument confusing is his labelling of McChesney and others as "pessimists" because they are focused more on what the media do to people than what people do to media. It seems like a fair argument but I'm just wondering whether Jenkins and McChesney et.al are focusing on the same matter. Whereas Jenkins's focus is in the "content layer" of communication, McChesney et. al's focus is on the "physical" (and also "code") layer of communication (their concern is how the monopolization of the physical and code layer of communication influences the content layer of communication). I think it is possible that people can have an influence on the content layer of communication but if the physical and code layer are controlled by media conglomerates how much of an impact can people's participation have? Even the Star Wars spoofs, culture jamming tactics, etc. that try to subvert the media conglomerate's content layer seem to get controlled by the media giants.

I have more to write on what I got from Jenkins...such as redefinition of leisure, comparison with Lessig's argument, and the possible future of democracy after training to become a better citizen through pop culture. I will post these after class.
Sorry if my arguments seem like nonsense. I'm confused myself.

Collective? Intelligence?

Some rather disjointed thoughts about Jenkins and his concept of collective intelligence:

Jenkins finds the distinction between "media" on the one hand and "delivery devices" on the other to be particularly important. How, then, is the "new" collective intelligence anything but the old collective intelligence repackaged into a new delivery device? People have been consulting the hive mind since time immemorial. At one time, when people's community activities were more varied and took them outside of their homes and neighborhoods more often, perhaps the minds with whom they interacted brought more diverse information to the table, as well. I'm envisioning, for example, a person faced with, say, a problem pertaining to some repairs done to his home. If that person was an avid churchgoer, for example, he might as a congregation member who is a contractor a question about the usual standards for doing these repairs, a congregation member who is a lawyer a question about whether he might sue, etc. How does what Jenkins envision as the new media version of the collective intelligence do anything but perhaps add more warm bodies to that model? And is some form of electronic collective intelligence simply supposed to replace the type of community that we're allegedly losing in real life?

Also, I'm interested in considering how Jenkins's ideas about the collective intelligence might tie into the discussion about deskilling and reskilling. I think, at heart, the Jenkins model works the best when everyone is an expert about something. He refers to collective intelligence as, "the sum total of information held individually by the members of the group that can be accessed in response to a specific question" (27). Fine. Yet, he also argues that the difference between his concept of collective intelligence and the concept of the expert paradigm is that "[w]hat holds a collective intelligence together is not the possession of knowledge- which is relatively static, but the social process of acquiring knowledge- which is dynamic and participatory, continually testing and reaffirming the group's social ties" (54). What?

When Jenkins talks about how the knowledge community is this extraordinary source of energy in the community, it sounds like he's on the verge of becoming one of those people who uses crystals to heal cancer. Or maybe I'm just particularly cranky before I've had my coffee.

Deliberativeness

I have noticed my own difficulties in maintaining the mindset that Free Labor had so wisely suggested we assume at the beginning of the semester: one in which I try to understand what ideas each author genuinely has to contribute, rather than jumping right in to critique and problematize everything each author asserts.

I have had to remind myself of this mindset advice especially frequently with the Jenkins reading. Perhaps these efforts will be useful for my final paper, which is on self-surveillance and mental self-disciplining.

I am impressed by the parallels and intersections in the descriptions of the (digital) world offered by Jenkins in Convergence and by Stahl in his "gametime" construction. Trying hard to maintain my Zen-like non-judgmental mental control, I could say that Jenkins and Stahl see much of the same empirical data and draw very different conclusions about its potential long-range outcomes. Jenkins appears not to buy (capitalist pun) the Stahlist assertion that immersion in the digital world significantly deactivates deliberative capacities. Could it be that one of the characteristics that Jenkins wants to attribute to the collective intelligence evidenced by ad hoc "knowledge communities" (57) is a sort of deliberative effect that is greater than the deliberativeness of any of its individual (somewhat overwhelmed and non-deliberative) players?

It is interesting to note here the two distinct meanings of "deliberate" associated with its two distinct pronunciations: "to think about issues and decisions carefully" and "slow, unhurried, and steady." Jenkins may believe that the group process of knowledge communities can link these two meanings, even if each of the individual participants cannot.

I think Jenkins is likely to be wrong in this belief, and that the belief itself could serve to blunt useful critiques of communicative capitalism. Okay, maybe the whole purpose of the belief is to deflect critiques of communicative capitalism. Away goes the Zen mindset again! I would like to think that Jenkins could be proven false empirically if the investigation could be framed and conducted with enough deliberateness.

Who's poaching who?

From the Blue Man Group: "Right now, there is a virtually invisible network that links together millions of people who would be otherwise be completely isolated form each other. This exciting technology has grown to become an incredibly complex web of connections, that is so large and difficult to track that is would be practically impossible to estimate its total size. And even though most of us live alone in urban isolation, this system represents one of the few ways, all of our lives are intertwined. This system is... modern plumbing."

How about a parallel: Since World War II, American culture has survived multiple protests, the threat of nuclear annihilation from Soviet Russia, and a difficult transition into a new globalized economy. But now, a tide is turning, culture is shifting and attacks are mounted once again. This time, we cannot see the enemies as clearly for they are revolutionaries working from the bottom-up, bent on changing civilization as we know it; these radicals are... fans of the tv show, "Survivor."

Now that I've stolen a page from the blue men, let me proceed to comment on stealing in general. I suppose I am operating under the assumption of an author here, telling you want I want to tell you. I will find some quotes and pictures and "riff" on a few things... then "rip on" a few ideas...maybe rip off some too. However, I am concerned that this assumption is only that - a synthetic a-priori postulation that I in fact control some of the narrative directions of story lines, intentions and the antagonisms that make them go. Here is my question - am I, are you, are we really textual "poachers" in the free associative thinking context that seems to subsume this idea? I fear not (another story brought to you by the machine of late 20th century antihumanist thought). I raise this question for two reasons:

Superficially, with regard to Jenkins, there seems to be a problem squaring the social antagonism of participatory/fan culture with respect to its positive valence as contrasted to the centralized power of corporate media vs. the notion of "free" textual poaching. Antagonisms are structuring operations or conceptual matrixes of understnding, or that which or rather through which understanding is molded, maintained. If Jenkins is right, it seems he is more in line with Stuart Hall - as opposed to dominant readings there might be resistant readings (along with negotiated ones). However, resistance is resistance to something, not the creation of communal participation and the production of an internal aesthetic or logic ex nihilo. If this does in fact arise emergently, then and only then could Jenkins solve his own problem of accounting for a more productive notion of "collective" intelligence (I think Chad is on the right track in terms of calling this collective free labor or a set of skills; I'd say its collective resourcefulness or a mistaking of the immaterial product with the notion of immaterial knowledge).

Secondly then, it seems a fantasy that we are poachers. The lack of developing this idea of idea of intellection come selection and deflection more fully shows, I believe, that Jenkins lacks a nuanced discourse of post-Foucaultian ideology where superstructural elements of micro-resistance (fandom) are already accounted for and networked to produce a cultural episteme. Alas, I rob from a Michel to pay a Mark.

After Our Mind Having Been Messed Up

During the whole semester, I have been trying very hard to organize what I have read. The more effort I put into thinking, the more eager I want to get an answer upon this question: who are you in this technologized world? I think people have already critized technology very much in the past decades. However, this is an issue that is so much related to Zizek. Zizek believes that people are aware of what it is going on in our life but still have to live the way it is. When Jenkins has voiced so many points that we can criticize, he actually draws our attention to how much the scholars and internet usuers/technology fans are walking in the same direction in contemporary world. Since there isn't a way to flee away, why shouldn't we just think about the positive side of the commercialized technology, Jenkins hints. We can abuse information, and make fun of the media products feeded to us by the industry and government.
However, can't Jenkins and others notice that we are at the same time directed by the topics provided by the industry and government during the process of desigining our "abusement"? How can people raise up a discussion on the topics that are "invisible" in the public sphere that are created by media?
While going to so many "cool" websites, I can't express how much I appreciate the neat and tranditional websites that are still existing on the internet. Didn't we notice that the revenge or creativity that are taken as convergence culture by Jenkins, at the same time, reduce the power of the "real" language or words? How much can people express ourselves as clear as our ancesors do now and in the future? This question might be answered very well by the comment on the cover of his book that Henry Jenkins really shares some commonality with McLuhan. He is so much focusing on the power of technology medium instead of the tranditional means of rhetoric in the society. But as we all know, the tranditional means, are still very important in influencing our thoughts and behaviors.

Free Labor? (Chinese Subtitles Translation Team)

August 9, 2006
Chinese Tech Buffs Slake Thirst for U.S. TV Shows
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
SHANGHAI, Aug. 8 — For the past year and a half, said Ding Chengtai, a recent university graduate, friends have wondered why he seems to have disappeared.
Mr. Ding, 23, an Internet technology expert for a large Chinese bank, chuckled at the thought. He has kept himself in virtual seclusion during his off hours, consumed with American television programs like “Lost,” “C.S.I.” and “Close to Home.”
He is no ordinary fan, though; none of the shows he watches can be seen on Chinese television. Instead, he spends night after night creating Chinese subtitles for American sitcoms and dramas for a mushrooming audience of Chinese viewers who download them from the Internet free through services like BitTorrent.
What is most remarkable about the effort, which involves dozens of people working in teams all over China, is that it is entirely voluntary. Mr. Ding’s group, which goes by the name Fengruan, is locked in fierce competition with a handful of similar outfits that share the same ambition: making American popular culture available in near-real time free to Chinese audiences, dodging Chinese censors and American copyright lawyers.
“We’ve set a goal of producing 40 TV shows a week, which basically means all of the shows produced by Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC,” Mr. Ding said, fairly bubbling about the project.
“What this means,” he said, “is that when the Americans broadcast shows, we will translate them. Our speed surpasses all the other groups in China, and our goal is to be the best American transcription service in the world.”
To a person, the adapters say they are willing to devote long hours to this effort out of a love for American popular culture. Many, including Mr. Ding, say they learned English by obsessively watching American movies and television programs.
Others say they pick up useful knowledge about everything from changing fashion and mores to medical science.
“It provides cultural background relating to every aspect of our lives: politics, history and human culture,” Mr. Ding said. “These are the things that make American TV special. When I first started watching ‘Friends,’ I found the show was full of information about American history and showed how America had rapidly developed. It’s more interesting than textbooks or other ways of learning.”
On an Internet forum about the downloaded television shows, a poster who used the name Plum Blossom put it another way.
“After watching these shows for some time, I felt the attitudes of some of the characters were beginning to influence me,” the poster wrote. “It’s hard to describe, but I think I learned a way of life from some of them. They are good at simplifying complex problems, which I think has something to do with American culture.”
Rendering American slang into Chinese is a special challenge. In an episode of “Sex and the City,” the line “I thought you two would hit it off” became “I thought you two would generate electricity together.” From “Prison Break,” the warning “Preparation can only take you so far” turned into: “People can only try to do things. It’s God’s will that ensures success.”
Whatever the programs say about American culture, translation efforts like these have received a boost from conditions particular to this country.
China combines a fast-growing population of more than 123 million Internet users, most with access to broadband service, with a stultifying television culture. The state-owned national network, CCTV, has 16 broadcast channels, but they vary little in their mixture of endless historical dramas, tepid soap operas and copycat game shows.
In an e-mail interview, a fan of American television shows who goes by the name of Happyidea and who asked not to be further identified gave this assessment of the Chinese programming: “Our own actors are not bad. Those responsible for making Chinese TV shows pathetic are the directors, screenwriters, editors and the people doing the lighting, music, special effects and makeup. There are bits of poor quality in every aspect, and it adds up to total trash.”
A longstanding practice of strict censorship that affects all Chinese media — and covers not only politics, but sexuality, violence and other subjects that form the grist of American entertainment — also drives audiences toward alternatives like downloadable television shows. And there are sharp limits on the number of American programs and Hollywood movies that can be broadcast or screened in theaters here.
Chinese authorities have long maintained strict limits on the portrayal of sexuality and, to a slightly lesser extent, violence for broadcast television.
Downloaded American television programs may have escaped those limits because, for now at least, they interest a relatively narrow segment of the population. Most viewers are college students, recent graduates and urban sophisticates who take the trouble to watch the shows on their personal computers.
Permitting the downloads may also serve as a sort of safety valve for an audience that is already accustomed to things foreign and would resent the censors’ limits.
China imported only 20 foreign movies last year, 16 of them American. American programs are similarly scarce on Chinese television.
“CCTV-8 aired ‘Desperate Housewives’ and we made a point of watching it,” said Jin Bo, 25, an English teacher and member of YDY, a leading rival to Fengruan. “I thought, Oh my God, the dubbing, the translation, why is it all so bad? It lost what made the original show wonderful, and the ratings were extremely low.”
For example, Mr. Jin said, “They would start the show at 10 p.m. and run three episodes back to back. Moreover, to adapt the program to fit the so-called situation of our country, words were eliminated or had their meanings altered. For example, the scene where Andrew reveals his homosexuality was cut.”
The rival television translation groups, by contrast, take great pride in their work, basing their translations on closed-caption transcripts in English that along with the programs themselves are typically captured on computers by collaborators in the United States and sent to China by Internet.
Strict hierarchies exist in each of the translation groups, with translators being promoted not simply for speed, which is vital, but for their faithfulness to the original material.
Official efforts to control the market for popular culture and the shows’ contents have long had the effect of encouraging piracy. Cheap DVD copies of newly released American movies have been sold on street corners throughout China for years. Recent attempts to crack down on these sales, at the insistence of the United States, have coincided with the boom in television and movie downloading, which could eventually make DVD piracy obsolete.
Representatives of American television networks said they were counting on new Chinese legislation to stop the translation and downloading of their programs.
“We are aware that because of their popularity, several Fox programs are particular targets of theft and unauthorized broadcast in territories around the world,” Teri Everett, a Fox spokeswoman, said by e-mail.
“It’s an ongoing effort, and one that will be greatly aided in China once the Chinese Internet regulations are finalized, which will clarify a number of issues relating to the enforcement of content providers’ rights on the Internet.”
Members of the translation groups are aware that their efforts may be considered a violation of copyright laws in other countries, but most view it as a mere technicality because they charge nothing for their efforts and make no profits, adhering to Chinese law.
China Warns on Spying
By The New York Times
BEIJING, Aug. 8 — China has executed a senior official convicted of spying for Taiwan and distributed a video of his trial as a deterrent to other civil servants, according to reports on government Web sites.
The official, Tong Daning, was a department head at China’s $26 billion national pension fund, the National Council for Social Security Fund.

No Matter What, Jenkins is needed

No matter what kind of opinion people have on Jenkins' argument about internet and collective intelligence, his study provides a different but exciting perspective from which we can examine and understand the internet culture better. The convergence culture is there, no matter it is the technological convergence or intellectual convergence, the line in between matters and people is blurred. It is another way to think about the fluid identity of people and the relationships in between different media technologies. The old and new technologies are combined, such as most newspapers have their own websites, the readers of the newspapers might are also the visitors of the according websites. But I didn't see, how Jenkins eveluates how much that the different media technologies are convergencing both horizontally and chronically? Are there the compraratively stable groups of people who are still the "loyal" users of certain media without paying attention to the new technology.
While Jenkins is celebrating the revolutionay and productive work of internet fans, how much did he know about the "new stereotypes" shaped by the internet fans at the same time, reinforced the circulation of certain media products? For example, like what John Dewey argued about democracy, conversation is always necessary and affective in promoting democracy. Does the exposure to numerous amount of information reinforce the oldness or reproduce the newness?

Diagnosing Fan Communities

Quick Lacan take on class discussion:

A. sublimate stuff with the real- the reality Jenkins strives for is unity, a harmonious way of finally eliminating antagonism and achieving fullness. His project is not driven by omnicensence as the real, but that the real is harmony in this system. Fantasies of fullness are essential to the function of systems. On page 26 the crisis rules argument is important, the structure of the community is created by deliberation.

B. run from the real, Zizek's account of wakings from dreams in Sublime Object is the reaction of fan community members running from the real, when too much accurate information would hit the community it would be come painful. Nominally the subject is seen as chasing the real, here the subject wakes to escape from the real. The story of ChillOne is the example of this. He got too good and delivered the real, this is clearly not in his clinical practice.

C. there is no therepy here, you just need to get more knowledge and become your own therapist.

Surviving the Logic of Capital

Jenkins brings attention to some of the relationships between producer and consumer that we previously talked about earlier in the semester, although something tells me for him it is unintentional. Jenkins seems to be concerned with the constitution of a knowledge community or collective intelligence, but his discussion, in a few ways, is reminiscent of prior ones concerning free labor and (the ever-present) logic of capital.

I wouldn’t say that Jenkins is commending people like Wezzie and Dan’s abilities to hunt down info to spoil – for Jenkins it still isn’t the spoilage that is the focus but rather the communal effort that must grow around this common enterprise. However, he does seem remiss for not acknowledging how capital is operating here – it’s free labor to its fullest! Dan and Wezzie “have built up contacts with travel agencies, government officials, film bureaus, tourism directors, and resort operators,” along with cultivating a relationship with the owner of a satellite communications company. On the one hand there is the argument, although it’s a weak one, that this isn’t labor at all and participants in this type of scavenger hunt derive entertainment value out of it, which I’m sure they do. It must be seen as free labor though because the difficulty in obtaining information about Survivor directly increases the mystique that Mark Burnett acknowledges is one of the factors that make his show popular. The workers are maintaining the (social) factory.

Jenkins also seems to fail to turn a more critical eye to the fact that producers of survivor admit that these spoiler discussion boards serve as “the best marketing research you can get.” The practices of consumers that are documented in Jenkins’ book are consistent with the argument that there is a logic of capital and that it does have the ability to not just push aside resistance but subsume and use it. “Liberating” technologies such as TiVo and even the Internet in general are shown to be used for and not against capital. Whereas once TiVo’s ability to skip commercials was touted as a function of autonomy and choice, it is now a tool used to play the clue-games built into some shows. Whereas the internet is still, by some, touted as a tool for building communities, capital co-opts these communities for market research.

All in the (loyal) family

I wonder if I can fit the following story into Jenkin's "can't we all just get along" theory of participatory-convergence culture.

I have a friend who almost lost her job for making fun of American Idol (or the fans of American Idol, it's hard to tell which, and it may not even matter).

It all started when the brother (who worked with my friend) of American Idol contestant Ace Young had a viewing party at a hotel bar in Denver. The party was attended by family, friends, and co-workers, who were encouraged to wear Ace Young promotional t-shirts and scream his name for the Fox News cameras that showed up to report on this important news event.

Apparently, my friend was outed (by an unknown informant) to be souring the whole spirit of the event when she parodied the enthusiasm of the party attendees by screaming in an apparently mocking tone, "I love you Ace. I want to have your babies." Things like that. This got back to a Vice-President of the company (a fan of the show), who wasn't there at the time.

In the following weeks, an email was sent to employees informing them that Ace would be showing up at the office to express his thanks for the support he received. My friend didn't get this, but the VP sent her a cryptic email that said she didn't want "trouble" from her. Then she was told to come into the VP's office, where she was reprimanded for what she had done at the (non-company sponsored) party. She was also informed that she would be in further trouble if she got up to any more "shenanigans" when Ace showed up. The VP actually used the word shenanigans.

Word got around the office about this meeting, and many co-workers were upset about the VP's actions. However, the Idol fans would constantly strike up conversations with my friend, wanting her to make witty and critical comments about the show and Ace. She had to tell them that she was not allowed to talk about the show, apparently, or to engage in shenanigans of any sort in relation to the show.

How would Jenkins interpret this? Inspirational consumerism comes to mind, and clearly there is some emotional capital attached to this moral imperative to police the actions of non-fans. But this is not quite in the direction that Jenkins sees as the important functions of participatory culture. It's quite clear that he wants to set up an antagonism between producers and consumers that tilts the scales toward the latter with the weight of participation. In this story, the power of the consumer is clearly not directed toward the program.

Power is clearly underdeveloped in Jenkins' work, and this degrades his ideas at every turn. Collective intelligence as an alternative source of media power is the hinge on which "the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact" (p. 2). I think this view of power is a reductive Foucaultian response (in the vein of some of Fiske's more non-critical cultural studies) to a reductive Marxism. Media have power quite above the fray of producers and consumers -- a symbolic power that legitimates, calls shots, orders logic, defines categories of thought and social existence, sets rules, etc.

Jenkins' smile

It is seemingly easy to make Jenkins our whipping post. When I read these chapters I was reminded of the story Mark told us about running into Jenkins at conferences. Mark alluded to the fact that although he may slam Jenkins' work, Jenkins still is quite nice and smiles at conferences. Why is he still smiling at Mark?

The important point is to not forget what Jenkins' role is (and what he envisions his role to be) in the "new" economy.

Jenkins plays the part of the wily consultant. If you have ever met a consultant or have been one yourself, you might now that they think industrialists and CEOs are quite dumb. They just don't get it. And this is why industry and corporations must pay them the big bucks because consultants like Jenkins get it. The consultants and marketing gurus are the Merlins of our day. They are the keepers of the secret. They claim to understand how this whole information economy thing works and (most importantly) how to adapt to the changes so that you and your business can make $$$$$$$$.

So - my useful thing from Jenkins is, true to his wily consultant spirit, he does not envision corporations as monolithic. If they were, they would not need help from consultants like him.

The Times is Totally Reading our Blog

Social Networking has a heart? Perhaps an example of the prototypical Jenkins consumer/citizen... My Network, My Cause

The self-organizing system and its emergent 'swarming' property...
From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm

When I spoke about the writers' strike, I supposed that the age of the mass worker perhaps .was not over. Apparently, I spoke to soon. Strike May Turn MySpace Series into an NBC Hit. For more info on Quarterlife, the 'first' internet series AND social network, visit Quarterlife.

I Confess.

I am a spoiler whore, and I have the ‘lovemarks’ to prove it. My closest friends hate my fondness for spoilers; they don’t want the coherence and integrity of the narrative ruined by the secret. Now I can tell them that I am a creature of the technoculture and they are as antiquated as Betamax™.

I found that it was useful to think about Dean when reading the second chapter. Namely, I found that the distinction Jenkins draws between Walsh’s ‘expert paradigm’ and Lévy’s ‘collective intelligence’ to align to the shift Dean identifies from the Benthamite split between the public-supposed-to-believe and the public-supposed-to-know [afforded by the existence of the secret] and the decline of symbolic authority and the collapse of the public-supposed-to-believe.

Jenkins begins by explaining that we Americans do not participate in public debates because of the expert paradigm: “to play the game, you have to become a policy wonk, or, more accurately, you have to let a policy wonk do your thinking for you” (29). There is an expert – a public-supposed-to-know – and we let them do the thinking for us – the public-supposed-to-believe.

Later on, Jenkins explains how the expert paradigm is breaking down (52-53): “Our traditional assumptions about expertise are breaking down or at least being transformed by the more open-ended processes of communication in cyberspace…The expert paradigm creates an exterior and interior; there are some people who know things and others who don’t. A collective intelligence, on the other hand, assumes that each person has something to contribute… is disorderly, undisciplined, and unruly.”

Dean says that “secrecy generates the very sense of a public that it presupposes...It presupposes a subject that desires, discovers, and knows, a subject from whom nothing should be withheld. The public as that subject with a right to know is thus an effect of the injunction to reveal” (10-11). Similarly, for Jenkins, the knowledge community is held together by “the social process of acquiring knowledge – which is dynamic and participatory, continually testing and reaffirming the group’s social ties” (55).

This may not make a lot of sense given that I haven’t fully wrapped my head around Dean and ideology but I’ll give it a go. When I continued thinking about the spoiler and Jodi Dean [and the shift from symptomatic to fetishistic ideology], I realized that I am very fetishistic when I enjoy my spoilers: I know the spoiler, nevertheless I watch the television program; my actions betray a belief in the coherence of the narrative and its structures. Then I began to wonder, are my prudish friends happy campers as the public-supposed-to-believe? Am I a creature of drive, getting off on knowing that the narrative is constructed, and are they stuck desiring an impossible unitary narrative? Suckers.

Some other thoughts.

Jenkins speaks about the military-industrial-entertainment complex in a very different way from Stahl: “America’s Army, thus, may be more effective at providing a space for civilians and service folk to discuss the serious experience of real-life war than as a vehicle for propaganda” (79). I think this really highlights the differences between Stahl’s notions of participation (democratic/reflective participant, to (inter)active ‘gametime’ participant) and what Jenkins calls, “participatory culture.” Although Jenkins makes the distinction between the passive spectator culture of mass media and the active consumer (3), it seems that the public sphere and its construction are both thought of in different ways, although perhaps betraying the same belief of the public which Dean problematizes.

I'll spoil some more...I can’t help but think of the Virno notion of the General Intellect when reading aobut Lévy’s ‘collective intelligence.’ “Mass intellectuality is the composite group of Post-Fordist living labor, not merely of some particularly qualified third sector: it is the depository of cognitive competences that cannot be objectified in machinery. Mass intellectuality is the prominent form in which the general intellect is manifest today. The models of social knowledge ... are not units of measure; they constitute the immeasurable presupposition of heterogeneous effective possibilities. Social relations are ordered by abstract knowledge rather than the exchange of equivalents” (Virno “General Intellect”)

I also admit that the idea of world-making (21) reminded me of emergence and biopolitics, “Game designers acknowledge that their craft has less to do with pre-structured stories than with creating the preconditions for spontaneous community activities” (159). This in turn reminded me of the multitude’s virtuosity: “Theirs is an activity which finds its own fulfillment in itself, without objectifying itself into an end product, without settling into a finished product, or into an object which would survive the performance.” This question of the productivity of the relations in themselves really seems to be something we could map onto the emergent properties of a self-organizing system (the multitude perhaps?).

I also must confess that Jenkins’ story of the new American arts is really reminiscent of De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. “The story of American arts in the twenty-first century might be told in terms of the public reemergence of grassroots creativity as everyday people take advantage of new technologies that enable them to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content” (136).

I'm glad I got ALL that off my chest.

Collective Intelligence or Collective Labor?

<--Click to enlarge
I'm only about 1/2 way through Jenkins as of right now, so he may address some of my comments later in the book...but I'm more in the writing (less in the reading) kind of mood right now. Blogs are about moods, right?

I find it upsetting when theorists give up the question of resistance altogether and try instead to fashion some utopia out of the impoverished materials of the culture industry with which they find themselves surrounded. It's so...1990s.

Here's a polemical statement (but probably not too controversial): I find no way of sustaining any argument that posits some redemptive value in so-called "collective intelligence," because the very term is a category error. We are talking, instead, about collective labor. What is intelligent about collective intelligence? The individuals involved are using problem-solving skills, but this hardly qualifies as "intelligence." Shouldn't intelligence be on the side of the multitude, reserved for describing those activities which work against, or exit from, empire?

I wonder if there is some rhetorical work being done by the slippery and indiscriminate application of "intelligence" to the activities of both humans and machines. This becomes especially problematic in the term "collective intelligence," which designates instances in which humans perform tasks in networks that mimic the structure of machine networks, and which also generally refers to carrying out large-scale surveillance operations, data mining and sifting, and strategic coordination of resources. If the answer weren't so obvious, one might be tempted to ask: What is it that these machines are training us for? We live in a world where "intelligence" has been redefined by cognitive science, engineering and electronics. Perhaps the true political gesture today would be to return to Heidegger's question and ask "what is called thinking?" Heidegger writes: "Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking," and "This situation is grounded in the fact that science itself does not think, and cannot think--which is its good fortune, here meaning the assurance of its own appointed course. Science does not think. This is a shocking statement. Let the statement be shocking, even though we immediately add the supplementary statement that nonetheless science always and in its own fashion has to do with thinking. That fashion, however, is genuine, and consequently fruitful only after the gulf has become visible that lies between thinking and the sciences, lies there unbridgeably. There is no bridge here--only the leap" (372-73).

Heidegger demarcates two modes of mental activity: scientific research and thought. There is no bridge between them, and we should take note of this. We should also take note that the modes of mental activity common to "collective intelligences" lie decidedly on the side of science: classificatory, scopic, operational, surveillant, etc. I would not prescribe Heidegger as a political corrective to the messiness of the collective intelligence folks (Levy and Jenkins)--it wouldn't really make sense since Heidegger is writing about what falls under the purview of philosophy, not politics. I would suggest, however, that we be careful to differentiate between one kind of brain-work and another, because such distinctions are political.

P.S.--Google trends is the coolest thing ever.

Conference dates...

As you ponder Jenkins, Free Labor, Convergence, and your paper for this class, I just wanted to remind people about a few conference deadlines that are coming up if you want to submit your work to further academic scrutiny:

Computer Culture Topics for Southwest Popular Culture Conference
Location: New Mexico, United States
Call for Papers Date: Due by 2007-11-15
Website: http://www.h-net.org/~swpca/
What's needed: a 150-word abstract in an email to jchaney@iusb.edu

Exploring New Media Worlds: Changing Technologies, Industries, Cultures, and Audiences in Global and Historical Context
Location: Texas A&M
Call for Papers Date: Due by November 20, 2007
Website: http://comm.tamu.edu/mediaworlds
What's needed: "Send papers or proposals (abstracts or annotated outlines) with a 50 word professional biography by email attachment to mediaworlds@tamu.edu. Panel proposals are also acceptable."

Cass Sunstein

I just came across a recent post by Cass Sunstein, whom Jenkins mentions in passing in his intermittent discussions of the relation between democracy and consumerism (which he has a tendency to conflate). I thought it might be interesting to see someone whose discussion of politics is a bit less oblique than Jenkins's.

The obscene father

Take a look at the latest Tancredo ad, set to air ASAP across Iowa. Remember Jodi Dean: under current conditions, we face, "the return of the obscene father. On the one hand, this reappearance of the father of enjoyment smears symbolic authority with all sorts of obscene excesses." Tancredo refers to those frothing with hatred, and works up quite a lather himself.

Worshipping at the altar of convergence

It would be exaggerating to say that everything we've read so far is meant to prepare us for the kinds of arguments Jenkins tries to get away with. Nevertheless, I am hoping that some of the theoretical foundations we've outlined might help but his claims within a broader context. Jenkins is good at telling the representative anecdote and at collecting information about the commercial deployment of the promise of interactivity. He's a lot thinner on the theory -- and especially the critical theory, which he tends to see as a form of reverse ressentiment directed by academic elites toward the pleasures of the mass audience. He's less fun to read, I think, without having gone through the immaterial labor literature (let's hear it for affective economics) and even Dean's arguments (who possesses the "secret" of Survivor?). Which is another way of saying that I tend to think of his book more as an object of theoretical inquiry/critique than an exposition of it. Can we bring the theories of the multitude, of immaterial labor, of the decline of the big Other to bear on the examples/analysis that Jenkins lays out? And what useful points do we think he makes?

More questions about productivity and free labor

I would like to call on the General Intellect of the class to try to get more of an answer to the question that was posed but never answered at the end of Tuesday’s class. This is especially for those who know their Marx better than I, which I figure is just about everyone reading this. If these questions fire up references or associations rather than clear answers, post these and I will do the exploring.

Mark’s question spoke to the issue of what is productive in what we might otherwise label as consumer behavior around consumption. It seems that a significant portion of what we are talking about as “immaterial labor” is the translation of various consumer behaviors into digitalized information. This generated data is valued by advertisers and by producers, for related but ultimately distinct reasons. Producers believe that this data will result in more or easier (i.e., less costly) sales. Advertisers believe that they can use this data to convince producers to buy more advertising. Ultimately it would up to the producers to make the empirical judgment as to whether or not this consumer data does really increase profits (either by generating more sales or by making sales less expensive to complete).

My question, then, is: what does Marxism have to say about this end stage of the capitalistic process, the behavior leading up to the actual purchase? Is producer profits the same, or essentially the same, as the extraction of surplus value that Marxism focuses on as one of the basic exploitations of capitalism?

Any process, whether via new media or not, that allows the capitalist to sell a product at a lower cost of production would result in greater profits for the producer. Does this mean that anything that I as a consumer do that contributes to lower a producer’s cost is, in some sense, “productive”? Is it “productive” if I shop on-line, allowing certain producers to bypass having to set up retail stores and the distribution and personnel costs associated with retail? This sort of “consumer choice” behavior seems somehow different from the more overt “free labor” in which someone engages in a behavior (without direct monetary compensation) that adds value to a product, such as an uncompensated webcam watcher “guarding” a nuclear plant. But are these two types of activities really different? Is the point that the structures of these new media systems we have been discussing make opting out of these free labor contributions virtually impossible (e.g., you generate usable data whether you want to or not)?

Or, if anyone would like to bring Stahl into this series of questions, can we reverse the “gametime” explanation (i.e., from warfare back to consumer capitalism) and say that new media systems embed (or seek to embed) everyone within their interactive systems so that they also “overcome the temporal space of ethical reflection”? Your own interactivity as a piece of the system becomes so much a part of who you are that “alienation” from free labor becomes a psychological impossibility—the free labor becomes part of who you are.

netwar strategies

You might have already seen this pic, it's a bit old, but I thought I'd post it anyway.

The class discussion about gametime and the role of military-themed videogames reminded me of how similar strategies can be used for anti-capitalist purposes. If you like punk rock and police cars on fire this music video (by Italian anarchist skinheads Klasse Kriminale) comes highly recommended: